Recent decades have seen a multitude of artists, musicians, and composers make intensive use of turntables, including their modification and augmentation. And thanks to the virtuosic application of techniques such as scratching and beat-matching, the turntable itself has become an instrument just as DJs have become musicians.
In the work for my artistic dissertation To Start from Scratch, which I completed at the mdw in October 2024, I involved the turntable as a research apparatus and experimental system in the sense of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, which is to say: as a dynamic configuration of material units, tools, techniques, and theoretical parameters developed continually via experimentation and exploration with an intent to generate knowledge in the realm of academic—and, in my case, artistic—practice.
Over the course of my project, I built upon this notion of a system to in part experimentally investigate multiple aspects of turntables so as to demonstrate how and what they can be used to research. Among other things, I engaged in artistic cooperation and improvisation with other turntablists and DJs in order to explore just what individual practices and ways of playing are employed and in which musical genres turntables have seen use. To this end, I compared present-day stances with one another as well as researched the turntable’s historical development and its use in musical and performative contexts. A further research interest pertained to the use of this apparatus as a composing machine for the design of graphic and simultaneously sound-producing scores, as proposed as early as the 1920s by László Moholy Nagy. This was joined by the question of how the phonograph record itself inscribes itself upon these works and what alternatives there are to the classic material of polyvinyl chloride, better known as “vinyl”.
The insights and artifacts generated by these investigations took shape as multiple installations and performative works that I put up for public discussion as part of my final presentation. They encompassed various record-based objects and video works as well as objects and sculptures including records made of grass and plaster. At the same time, however, these physical outcomes were accompanied by reflective documentation—as is customary in the artistic doctoral programme. Such documentation goes above and beyond the physical objects and artistic works themselves to provide insights into the underlying process and describe methods and findings in a theoretically grounded manner. In order to continue pursuing my research questions in the documentation, as well, the logical way forward was to select the phonograph record as its format. In the interest of adhering to good scientific practice, I oriented myself on the concept of the “audio paper”—documenting my reflections and findings in a boxed set consisting of four records and a booklet. These are now accessible to interested listeners at the Austrian National Library and at the University Library of the mdw.
